sister’s parenting choices.
For such a cream puff of a woman, Laurel had been awfully hard on Marley. No sympathy, no fuss-it was as if being born without arms was a perfectly natural thing. And she’d insisted on Marley doing everything he could for himself, using his feet for hands. Or almost everything-one of the carpenters at the Core had built the boy an articulated dressing and ass-wiping stick with an alligator clip on one end connected to a rubber handle he could hold in his mouth on the other.
And Laurel had been proved right, of course. Not only was Marley remarkably unself-conscious about his handicap, but over the years the boy had learned to use his toes as fingers and developed a contortionist’s flexibility in his legs.
Good job, Laur’, thought Holly, leaning back and wiggling around until both the pressure and the placement of Marley’s feet on her back made the long, powerful quadratus lumbarum muscles alongside her spine start to relax. The sun was warm on Holly’s face, the sound of the sea was tranquilizing, and the tears rolling down her cheeks, if not quite tears of joy, were by no means tears of sadness, either.
On their way home from the beach, Holly and the kids spied Dawson sitting on a bench under a tin-roofed shelter by the side of the Circle Road. She was waiting for the little blue ride-share bus known as the Too-Too (too small, too slow, too expensive, and far too seldom seen) that circled the island at unpredictable intervals.
“Hey, hepsie gyirl, ya well lollis, come ride wit’ we.” Marley called out the window, in a perfect imitation of a cruisin’ St. Luke buoy. A hepsie girl was well built; well lollis meant provocative.
If I were ten years younger, and you were ten years older, thought Dawson, dragging her backpack full of calabash over to the bus rather than pick it up one more time. Come to think of it, if you were just ten years older, I’d take my chances. (Laurel, Marley’s mother, used to worry about how Marley would do with the opposite sex when he grew up. Dawson used to tell her that as far as she was concerned, a man with no hands might be a refreshing change-most men she knew seemed to have far too many.)
They ended up giving the other two occupants of the bus shelter a ride out to the strip mall. As long as they were there, Holly gave the kids money for ice cream while she stopped into the drugstore for some necessaries. On her way back to the Baskin-Robbins, which was sort of an island joke among visiting statesiders, because it had only a dozen flavors, a newspaper headline in a vending machine caught her eye. She dropped a quarter in the slot and read the lead article as she strolled down the sidewalk.
Dawson was waiting outside the store. Holly handed her the paper. “Did you see this?”
“That’s Apgard’s wife.”
“I know her. She volunteers-volunteered-at the rest home. Nice lady. I can’t believe it.”
“I can,” said Dawson. Then, in pig latin, as the kids joined them: “Ater-lay.”
“Ater-lay ut-way?” asked Marley, taking a lick off his cone, which was in Dawn’s right hand; her own was in her left.
“Ater-lay, ever-you-mind-nay,” replied Holly, distractedly. Part of her was thinking about poor Hokey; another part couldn’t help thinking that if Marley had prosthetic hands, he could have held his own ice-cream cone.
5
“Johnny?”
“Sah?”
“If anybody else shows up to pay a condolence call, shoot them, would you?”
“To kill or wound?”
“Your choice.”
By Friday evening. Lewis was exhausted to the point of collapse. After Vogler left, he’d spent the afternoon dealing with lawyers, making funeral arrangements (Chief Coffee had assured him they’d be done with the body by Sunday), and receiving callers. The governor showed up, as had almost all of the island’s power elite.
There had also been an endless procession of Hokanssons and Christianssons, Hokey’s maternal line. For an only child, Hokey had a seemingly infinite supply of relatives, especially in light of the fact she was an orphan. Both her parents had died during the Blue Valley Massacre in 1985, when armed men interrupted the Three Kings Night Ball, always a highlight of the social season. The leaders of St. Luke society had been lined up against a marble wall, stripped of their cash and valuables, then gunned down. Eight dead, fourteen wounded, and the remainder of both the social and tourist seasons in shambles.
The Ladies Who Golf contingent, stringy, casserole-bearing women with blond hair and sun-ravaged complexions, were the last callers. They had decided not to cancel the women’s match play tournament that year, they told Lewis, but to reschedule it and name the trophy after Hokey, if that was all right with him.
Sadly, the grief-stricken husband had given his consent. Grief-stricken husband was a part Lewis had been playing all day, with such conviction that by evening, with the help of a steady rum ration administered by Johnny, the role had become the reality, at least on some level. Hokey was gone-never mind why, or who was to blame-and there was certainly no one who had more reason to feel sorry for himself than Lewis.
After the flood of condolence calls dried up, Sally reheated a sampler platter from the hot dishes that had been dropped off, and Johnny set up a TV tray in the study. Lewis picked unenthusiastically at the various offerings while he watched the business report. When Johnny returned to clear the tray, Lewis told him to have Sally take what she wanted and send the rest on to the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home. Ditto the flower arrangements.
Again, Johnny and Sally offered to spen’ night; again Lewis turned them down. The clock was ticking: he had to kill someone that weekend, and he still had no idea whom he was going to choose. He vaguely remembered Emily having given him some pointers the previous night, after her all-hang-together speech, but most of it had been washed away by the rum.
Emily did have confidence in him-he remembered that much, though he wasn’t quite sure what was behind this confidence. She just kept saying it was
The Great House was empty again. Alone in his study with a fresh bottle of Reserve for company and a pipeful of rain forest chronic for inspiration, Lewis worked out his problem.
The biggest obstacle, he realized, was that the method of execution was fixed and unalterable, as was the murder weapon-Bennie’s machete, which had been used in all the previous Machete Man killings. (There had been some discussion between the three of them as to whether to leave Bennie himself behind to help Lewis, but it had been decided that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise-Bennie also needed an alibi.)
That left the who, when, and where aspects of the problem still to be decided. But the more Lewis thought about it, the clearer it became that all three questions were interrelated. Either the subject would determine the location and timing, or the location and timing would determine the subject. The latter arrangement, he decided, would be fairer, to a
Location, then: someplace populated enough to provide a subject, yet isolated enough to abduct or even dispatch the subject without being seen himself.
Maybe one of the bus shelters on the Circle Road. But the Too-Too stopped running around ten or eleven at night-earlier if the bus driver got too-too drunk.
How about Sugar Town? Too crowded, too difficult for a white man to negotiate without being noticed.
The lime grove? Sometimes during the day, down-island women hiked or hitchhiked to the public grove at the edge of the forest that his grandfather, like Julius Caesar, had willed to the citizens in perpetuo. But the only visitors at night were the Wharf Street whores, who occasionally brought tricks there for an al fresco fuck-which meant of course, that they were never there alone.
There was another location, however, at the opposite edge of the forest, where there would be plenty of foot traffic at night, Lewis suddenly realized. He was thinking of the Core, and more specifically, of the communal shit’n’shower known as the Crapaud. Healthfully situated in the woods, away from the dwellings, accessible only via a narrow path through the forest-a path every person in the Core probably traveled every night.
Fish in a barrel-a parade of fish in a barrel, so to speak. All Lewis would have to do would be to position
